A Quiet Cadence: A Novel
Marty McClure is a retired teacher with a loving wife and two kids who know him as a kind and peaceful man. But deep in his youth, he was marked by a violence that would haunt his dreams and waking life. “My family and friends know me as a man whose most violent moments generated fast tennis serves. How do I explain that when I was very young, I plumbed the depths of depravity without knowing if I’d find my way back to sanity’s surface?”
So begins one of the most beautifully written and utterly unflinching Vietnam war novels to come along in decades. The novel introduces a fresh-faced 19-year-old Marty McClure who steps off a helicopter in Vietnam in 1969, joining his Marine unit as a machine gunner’s assistant. He is called “Mick” by his fellow soldiers. Their unit steps off deep into the jungle to search for an enemy maddening in its ability to dissipate wraith-like into the forest. More than half the novel is a relentless barrage of ambush and booby trap carnage, leaving the reader wide-eyed and rooted to the page. After being wounded, Marty returns to the States, where his journey of healing is only the beginning. Over the years, he builds a family and career while trying to confront both the ghosts of his past and the galling compromises of the present, leaning on the love of his wife and the shared understanding of former comrades-in-arms.
Mark Treanor has penned an instant classic of war fiction, one whose images do not go gently into that good night but force us to confront the searing psychological scars many former wartime soldiers suffer with silently. A must read.
